Norwegian firm Opera Software has unveiled the latest version of its Internet browser, Opera 11.6, “just in time for the festive season”, according to a company announcement today.

Opera is the world’s fifth most popular browser, behind Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Apple’s Safari. W3Counter estimates that, as of November 2011, Opera enjoys a 2.4 percent share of the worldwide market, and the firm itself claims to have had more than 220 million downloads.

The company has introduced a number of changes to 11.6, which include:

New browser engine: which the company claims makes browsing faster and more efficient, thanks to a “new HTML5 parsing algorithm which helps unify code discrepancies among browsers”.

Improved in-browser email: improvements have been made to the in-browser mail feature, which operates like Google’s Gmail Chrome app

With version 11.6, Opera has also refined a number of existing features, which include the rather nifty mouse gestures (which you can see more of here) that help save time, tabs, extensions, bookmark synchronisation and other features that have now become standard browsers.

Internet users with less stable Web connections — as is often the case in developing markets — can switch to Opera Turbo, which “uses Opera’s cloud-assisted browsing technology to compress Web pages thus making them [load] faster “.

Opera’s Christmas cheer is particularly infectious, and the company is releasing 11.6 “just in time for the holiday season”.

Almost 50% of the world’s population has never tried a new browser — people in your own town, maybe even someone you know. Why not help them discover something better this year? A new browser is a gift that keeps giving all year round.

I’ve always been a big fan of Opera browsers, particularly on the mobile phone, as they are efficient and speedy. For those less certain than me, however, Opera has ten compelling reasons to check out its latest browser:

You clean everything to prepare for the holiday, why not your computer?